Automation and the Future of the Finance Function

Automation will soon be ubiquitous within the finance function because it saves employee time, reduces processing times, and provides excellent ROI. There’s no better example of the power of bringing automation to the finance function than what Amazon has done in the past five years. Together with PwC and UiPath, Amazon has been upskilling their entire finance function. And they’ve seen impressive results.

Though they started small, Amazon’s approach has been nothing short of ambitious—and fast. In the first year and a half of the finance function transformation, Amazon automated over 30,000 hours worth of tasks. It turned out that a significant number of tasks humans were doing could be handed over to robots. Over the past five years, they’ve automated 75% of offshore transactional tasks while also reducing cash-to-contract cycle time by 75%.

Because of all the time saved from monotonous tasks, employees could spend more time on generating meaningful, business-driving insights. They went from spending 23% of their time on these tasks in 2016 to 57% in 2020. In the same period, they also decreased transaction processing time from 56% to 19%. They achieved all this while reducing the cost of finance as a percentage of firm revenue to 0.62% from 0.78%.

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